a softer world

I wrote this a while back for This Magazine. It’s a write-up of a webcomic, one I have since bookmarked because of its talent for catching at something in my chest. And in only three panels!

The strip now appears in The Guardian. It’s writer, Joey, lives in Toronto, though he’s currently touring the west coast with a compilation of cover letters he recently published. When we spoke, he gave me an older book of short stories, some of which have been adapted for other publications. They read kind of like children’s science fiction or horror writing, but without safety padding at the edges. They’re more satisfying that way.

Hard Truths In ‘A Softer World’

“STRIPS HAVE THAT SAMENESS of rhythm that haikus have,” observed Canadian cartoonist Seth. He was talking about Peanuts, but he might well have extended his comment to A Softer World, a webcomic that artfully positions bits of text over three panels of photographs to tell larger stories than 20-odd words typically allow.

With no consistent characters and virtually no dialogue, A Softer World is held together by its whimsical photographs and halting narratives, the latter a result of an attention to line breaks and spacing typically characteristic of poetry. The other common thread is the strip’s few pervasive themes: escapism, hope, sexual deviation and—as writer Joey Comeau puts it—people doing terrible things.

“It’s trying to express something that you never…” Keep reading

active listener

My most recent article in This Magazine is a memorial-type piece about Len Dobbin, a central figure in Montreal’s jazz scene. I never met Len and I wasn’t aware of his legacy until this summer, when he died and I started contacting his friends and colleagues for this assignment. He was a remarkable guy in a lot of ways, perhaps most importantly – for the jazz scene, at least – in that he was in love his whole adult life, and propelled by that energy. “He had jazz in his heart,” remembered friend and venue-owner Joel Giberovitch. “It was stronger than him.”

But then again, lots of people love jazz. What’s striking about Len is that as a non-musician – as a listener – his love had such an impact.

Remembering Len Dobbin, Montreal’s Most Important Jazz Listener

IN EARLY FALL OF 1950, Len Dobbin stepped out of a listening booth on Rue Ste-Catherine in Montreal to find himself confronted by five New York jazz enthusiasts seeking potential founders for a satellite jazz appreciation society. Only 15 years old at the time, Dobbin had never met enough fans to think the project would succeed, but he agreed to give it a shot. As it turned out, there was enough interest in the city to sustain the club for almost a decade, but, more importantly for Montreal, the experience was enough to get Dobbin hooked indefinitely.

He spent the next six decades as a self-described “friend to jazz,” though his his tireless enthusiasm as a journalist, photographer, promoter, researcher, and fan—almost entirely without pay—suggests an unusually demanding definition… Keep reading

He spent the next six decades as a self-described “friend to jazz,” though his

ponzi schemed here, too

My feature in Maisonneuve is now free online. It’s a history piece with contemporary resonance: the Canadian story of Charles Ponzi. Did you know that before he was a famous con artist, Ponzi, of the eponymous scheme, spent some formative years in Montreal? It’s true!

At the turn of the century, Montreal was an anglo-dominated city, and Canada’s financial core. It was also where our young Italian immigrant landed his first decent job, closely followed by his first jail sentence. My friend Joe drove me out to Laval to look for the prison one drizzly, pre-spring afternoon. Its soaring stone walls are no longer in use, but the structure is still formidably and resolutely there.

Pure Laine Ponzi
The Quebec connection that turned Charles Ponzi into history’s most notorious scam artist.

IN 1907 CHARLES BIANCHI stepped off a train at Montreal’s Bonaventure station. He had spent the previous four years in the North-Eastern US, working the sorts of jobs an Italian immigrant could get while mastering English. With no luggage and only a dollar in his pocket, it’s not hard to imagine he was desperate.

By his own account, Bianchi walked two blocks from the station to the city’s financial district, where he spotted an Italian bank and demanded an interview with its owner, Louis Zarossi. Impressed that he had been tricked into thinking Bianchi an important man, Zarossi hired him on the spot. Over the following months, Bianchi worked his way up from clerk to bank manager.

Banco Zarossi proved an unusual company. It offered its immigrant clientele up to triple the going interest rate; a bit… Keep reading

If you reach the end of the article and want to read even more, try Zuckoff’s meticulous, digestible biography; Ponzi’ s own is quite hard to get a hold of.